Google’s donation will allow Kubernetes community to self-manage cloud resources, increasing project control and velocity

VANCOUVER, Canada – August 29, 2018 – Open Source Summit North America – The Cloud Native Computing Foundation® (CNCF®), which sustains and integrates open source technologies like Kubernetes® and Prometheus™, today announced that Google Cloud has begun transferring ownership and management of the Kubernetes project’s cloud resources to CNCF community contributors. Google Cloud will help fund this move with a $9 million grant of Google Cloud Platform credits, divided over three years, to cover the infrastructure costs associated with Kubernetes development and distribution, such as running the continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipelines and providing the container image download repository.

With this move, CNCF and Kubernetes community members will take ownership of all day-to-day Kubernetes project operations. Responsibilities will include operational tasks for the development of Kubernetes such as testing and builds, as well as maintenance and operations for the distribution of Kubernetes. The Google Cloud credit grant will primarily be dedicated to funding scalability testing and maintenance of the infrastructure required to run Kubernetes development, ensuring that the project continues to be battle-tested and enterprise-ready.

“With the rapid growth of Kubernetes, and broad participation from organizations, cloud providers and users alike, we’re thrilled to see Google Cloud hand over ownership of Kubernetes CI/CD to the community that helped build it into one of the highest-velocity projects of all time,” said Dan Kohn, executive director of CNCF. “Google Cloud’s generous contribution is an important step in empowering the Kubernetes community to take ownership of its management and sustainability – all for the benefit of the project’s ever-growing user base.”

To learn more about today’s news, please read William Denniss’ post on the Google Cloud Platform blog.

The contribution of the Kubernetes project from Google occurred soon after the creation of CNCF in late 2015 and, until now, Google Cloud has continued to manage and fund the Kubernetes CI/CD processes. Since coming into CNCF, Kubernetes has grown into one of the world’s most popular open source projects and, according to Redmonk, is running in more than 50 percent of Fortune 100 companies for container orchestration. To facilitate and support this growth, CNCF established a Certified Kubernetes program to define a consistent experience across Kubernetes distributions, launched the Kubernetes Certified Service Provider (KCSP) program – ensuring that enterprises receive support to roll out new applications more quickly and more efficiently than before –and shepherded Kubernetes through the incubation process to become the first project to graduate from CNCF.

“Since releasing Kubernetes in 2014, Google has remained heavily involved in the project and actively contributes to its vibrant community. We also believe that for an open source project to truly thrive, all aspects of a mature project should be maintained by the people developing it. In passing the baton of operational responsibilities to Kubernetes contributors with the stewardship of the CNCF, we look forward to seeing how the project continues to evolve and experience breakneck adoption,” said Sarah Novotny, Head of Open Source Strategy for Google Cloud.

Cloud native computing uses an open source software stack to deploy applications as microservices, packaging each part into its own container, and dynamically orchestrating those containers to optimize resource utilization. The Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) hosts critical components of cloud native software stacks, including Kubernetes and Prometheus. CNCF serves as the neutral home for collaboration and brings together the industry’s top developers, end users and vendors – including the world’s largest public cloud and enterprise software companies as well as dozens of innovative startups. CNCF is part of The Linux Foundation, a nonprofit organization. For more information about CNCF, please visit www.cncf.io.

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